Monday, April 11, 2011

First attempt

Nice, highlighting the similarities between collage and sampling will bring cohesion.
I enjoyed looking at Agnes Montgomery's work--are there other collage artist's that you're drawn to?
Will your album cover and poster be done by hand or digitally?
Also, something to think about--what kind of role will these things you mentioned in the post--beauty, chaos, and order--have in your work, conceptually and aesthetically?

This weekend I took a shot at making my own collage. To answer Annie's question, there is another collage artist that I'm drawn to, Kurt Schwitters, particularly the Merzbild series from the MERZ exhibition in 1972, shown here:

I like his work, because of, to allude to Annie's question again, how he conveys very solid concepts using abstraction. This particular series was revealed to be about his "artistic, private, and public concerns during the inflationary period in Germany that followed World War I" ("Collage: Critical Views" by Katherine Hoffman, p. 226). What he did for this series was " 'paste up pictures and drawings so that sentences should be read in them,' " but what I was really drawn to in his work was the way he develops a sense of frustration using seemingly unrelated sources and combining them to make cohesion. His use of sentences and words as an almost subliminal messaging system is a bit too obvious for me, but I like his basic philosophy. I also like the scattered, seemingly disorganized image that came out of this combining of random sources. While most of the other collage artists I have looked at were using very solid images of people or flowers or boats or eyeballs, Schwitters uses different patterns and shapes that aren't necessarily recognizable. It is beautiful because it looks like there is no cohesion, but really it is all trying to convey one single message.

When making my collage, like Schwitters was trying to convey a message about inflation, I was trying to convey a message about my boyfriend's band's music. Here is what I came up with:

(I can't find a scanner big enough to fit the entire 13x13 image on, so some is cut off of the bottom.) It's made entirely out of a J. Crew catalog, and what I kept in mind while making it was using different colors and shapes that create an emotion. I noticed that in a lot of Schwitters' work there were triangular shapes, so I used this shape as I was cutting the pieces out of the magazine. It creates a sharp, sort of splintered feeling. The thing I like most about the collage is that, although it is very colorful, I only incorporated ONE word on the entire thing: BLACK. You might not be able to see it at this small scale, but it is on the black part. I used Schwitters' word idea, but not in such an obvious way. I guess, if I could summarize the idea for this collage it would be beauty out of chaos using colors and shapes from different sources to create one cohesive piece of art. Maybe that's redundant but I felt I needed to summarize it somehow, haha.

1 comment:

So there is the word black in the black portion? I think you are write it is awful hard to see in the little picture but it is a neat idea. Is this the final cover art you plan to use or is it just a step towards that, and in the final one do you plan to use "hidden" or incorporated words?

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I am an artist, writer, and blogger who writes about art, the environment, travel, and the intersection of the three. View my writing samples below or peruse this blog. I can be contacted at rachele.m.krivichi@gmail.com for freelance writing inquires.